Noise-induced intermittency in the quasiperiodic regime of Rayleigh-Bénard convection

Thermal measurements on a converting dilute³He-superfluid⁴He solution in the quasiperiodic regime show a transition from a mode-locked periodic state to chaotic time dependence via intermittency. The type of intermittency is discussed in the context of standard models of the phenomenon. In a region just below the onset of intermittency, injection of external multiplicative noise with noise amplitude above a certain threshold level induces the chaotic state. This noise-induced transition can be understood to be due to perturbations of a system with a barely stable attractor; the noise causes the system to escape the weakly attracting periodic points. We present a numerical simulation of a 1D map with external noise which explains some aspects of the noise-induced behavior, and a 2D map which has certain features of the intermittency.